What do you mean by "nothing works"? The computers don't boot up? You can't run your favourite game? Explorer crashes? Or do you mean that you can't see the other computers in the Network neighborhood maybe?

All computers must belong to the same workgroup. You have to enable NetBIOS over TCP/IP in TCP/IP settings (enable, not set to automatic).
Also, all computers need to have the same users with the same passwords or you have to share folders with "everyone" permissions.

Go into Computer Management/Local Users and Groups/Users
Enter the username (and password if required) of the other PC's and give them the required rights.
Make sure you go to the Shared directory and give these users access as required.
Do this on all 3 PCs.
That should do it.

In Explorer, right-click on the C-drive in the left window, this should give you all sort of options on a long dropdown menu.
Select Sharing... and do your stuff there.
If you don't get the drop-down menu, someone has messed up the Explore settings. You'll have to dig a bit deeper.

hmm... you said that you can access the default share "SharedDocs" which means that everything, on the connections side of things, is OK.

What you need to check now is that all 3 computers are on the same Workgroup. You can either do this manually by right-clickin on My Computer, then clicking Properties, and then click the Computer Name tab and then click the Change button. Once there you'll be able to change the name of the of the computer as the well as the workgroup that the computer should be a member of. They should all be on the same workgroup. OR, you can run the Networking Wizard which is built into XP which, as i have found numerous. fixes 90% of the problems. The Networking Wizard usually assigns the computer to a workgroup called "MSHOME". :rolleyes:

Apart from that, there's a common problem with Peer-to-Peer networks (ie. it's not a Domain) where the computer which has been elceted as the "Master Browser" has to be restarted, or is disconnected from the network for some reason or other. When this happens it can cause problems when trying to browse for computers in the "My Network Places" window.

I'm using Windows 2000 Server (as a PDC and the only domain controller) on my network. I have Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Windows XP Pro clients.

When I log on to the domain with a XP client all the network shares (and printers) work OK for a certain amount of time (I don't know exactly how long 2min-5min) but after that they stop working. If I try to connect to a network share I get this error message:

The system detected a possible compromise in security. Please ensure that you can contact the server that authenticated you.

If I log out and then log in again, everything works again. I don't have any problems with NT and 2000 clients and the domain server itself is available all the time.

A day ago our company's file sharing network went down. We have a feeling that it's the master browser problem that you have been discussing. Like the great article, from the link by bajan, said I went around to try and find our master browser. None came up. one computer did fail to access netbt when I entered nbtstat -n . we suspect this computer is the problem and we are thinking of reinstalling xp. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

That problem is worked out. I found out netbios was turned off in that computer. However our network still does not have a master browser. Thanks to all that have read this post and have been contemplating a solution.